Walker Percy

Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916. He lost his father at thirteen and his mother two years later, and was adopted by a cousin of his father's, a poet, who lived in Mississippi. A medical graduate of Columbia in 1941, he contracted tuberculosis while performing autopsies; two years in a sanatorium at Saranac Lake, where he read Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, then a relapse turned him towards philosophy. He converted to Catholicism in 1947 and gave up medicine. He published six novels and essays on language, and died in Covington, Louisiana, in 1990.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelThe MoviegoerWalker Percy · 1961Literature